The Dinosaur Hunter(72)

“Good idea,” I responded. “Tell Frank to send the bill to Cade Morgan.”

Charlie wrote that down and then he and Henry took Toby for a ride into town. I sought out Tanya who was still sitting on a picnic table. She was staring at the lake. “I’m ready,” I said.

She pitched her coffee cup and the cardboard thingy in the trash can and off we went in Bob. Tanya said nothing on the way and neither did I. When we got to Jericho, I checked the parking lot of Tellman’s. None of our trucks were there but Mori was, playing basketball with her kids. “They all checked out this morning,” she said when I asked her about Jeanette, Ray, Amelia, Laura, Pick, and the Marsh brothers.

“You need not bother with me, Mike,” Tanya said. “Laura will come back to take me to camp.”

“I think you should stick with me,” I said. “Anyway, I’m heading back to Blackie Butte.”

“I thought you would not go back there. I thought you were done with us.”

“I work for Jeanette,” I said. “She told me to dig bones so that’s what I’ll do until she tells me to stop. But before we go out there, I’d like to have a word with Cade Morgan.”

Tanya had no problem with the extra stop. When we turned out of the motel parking lot, I saw a State Police car rolling by. It turned toward the Hell Creek Marina so I drove Bob after him, flashing my headlights. The trooper pulled over and I waited for him to approach me.

As I expected, Billings had sent us up a kid cop. He looked all of eighteen, although he was probably in his early twenties. He walked up to the front of Bob and peered at me through chrome sunglasses beneath a Smokey the Bear hat. “What can I do for you, sir?”

“Are you going out to see that body at the marina?”

He studied me, then said, “Yes. Do you know something about that?”

“The body is in the Jericho mortuary. That’s on Main Street, across from the Hell Creek Bar.”

He withdrew a notebook from his shirt pocket and jotted something down. “Your name, sir? And can you tell me your interest in this?”

I gave him my name, address, and the Square C phone number and told him I was one of the guys who’d pulled the body out of the lake. When I asked the policeman his name, he said he was Trooper Philpot and I let drop that I was a brother, more or less, i.e., a retired cop. “Do you have any credentials to that effect, sir?” he asked.

I didn’t. “You can check with the Los Angeles Police Department. They still send me a disability check.”

“All right, sir. Thank you for this information.”

“Look,” I said, “I think this guy was a member of an organization that kills people and loves doing it. If this hits the newspapers, more of them might come here looking for revenge. I think you should talk to your superiors about the situation.”

Trooper Philpot’s eyes were heavy-lidded. “Sir, we have procedures for every case. I see no reason to talk to my superiors, as you say.”

“Trooper Philpot, these people will come after you and, just for the fun of it, cut off your head and use it for a soccer ball.”

“I believe I have all I need, sir,” he said. “Anything else?”

There was nothing else. Trooper Philpot got back in his car, turned around, and headed for the mortuary. Tanya saw my worried frown and said, “What are we going to do?”

“Visit Toby’s best friend,” I said and aimed Bob out of town, to Ranchers Road, and on to the end of it where the old Corbel place was, and also Cade Morgan.





23




Cade had no gate at the entrance of the dirt road that lead into his place. There was, however, a cedar-and-wrought iron arch over it, which read morgan’s mess. Well, we had a mess, all right, and Cade had identified whose mess it was. After all, he had brought Toby to Fillmore County and, for all I knew, had taken him out of it, too. The three main reasons for murder are, so the detective handbooks say: jealousy, revenge, and money. Based on my truncated cop career, I would also add insanity, passion, stupidity, and just because. In Cade’s XXX business, there was plenty of every one of those motives.

Cade’s house had been remodeled into a California-style split level, which was very nice and modern and therefore looked completely out of place on a Montana ranch. His pastures were overgrown with knapweed and leafy spurge, which were living testament to his ignorance. These were villainous plants, which, unhindered, could spread across the ranches of Ranchers Road like wildfire, choking out the good grass. I wondered if Cade had any idea of the threat his neglect was causing the rest of us. Most likely, he thought letting nature do what it wanted to do was environmentally friendly. For his neighbors, even if he’d killed Toby, this was his worst sin.